An Epitaph for a Newsman
I don’t know when I became so apocalyptic. I think being out in the real world, and being amidst so powerful a maelstrom of activity, change, upheaval and general chaos and discord has brought me to question the stability of just about everything. Will the institution I now belong to still exist in five years? In ten? Twenty? Nothing is impermenant. All is susceptible to change. This could be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. Now, I look to the future and I see ruin and disorder. Chaos and fire, real or metaphoric, and widespread change. Everything we know, all that is familiar, is becoming washed away by a gargantuan flood, and in its wake, we will stand upon new foundations, carved from hindsight into the mold of tomorrow’s soil.
Journalism, as always, is the growing pressure on my mind, the ever present monkey on my back. The industry in which I hope to earn my living could well be dying, lashing out in its death throes, consumed by thousands of flesh-eating microbes, each so small and inconsequential that they could easily be ignored, yet together they form a mass of death that consumes the tenuous financial fabric upon which the news has been stitched for so very long.
We can’t live as we have. Like it or not, journalism is changing. Yet change is a hopeful, optimistic word. Change implies a tomorrow–for what can a corpse change into, save for dust and dirt? You can’t market dust and dirt. So, change and hope. How WILL we earn a profit in this new era? How will the fabled internet carry our lofty goals into the rising sun, so that we may live and eat off the gains of our new massive medium? These are questions often asked, and widely debated. Yet one question isn’t being asked, or at least, isn’t being asked enough.
What if there is none? What if the very force that makes the Internet so popular, so wide-spread and accessible, is the very same force that makes it wholly unmarketable? Time and time again, forces have attempted to control the Internet, control the flow of information. That’s how you make money. You control, and then you surrender part of that control in exchange for dollars and cents. Once, journalists controlled information. We were the ones who told you what was happening. Not the government, not corporations, not the police–us. We were the message board, and you had no choice but to pay your 75 cents and pick up a paper to learn the latest headlines. No longer.
Now, you have a million blogs, many useless, many not. A tech-savvy person can pick up his laptop and report a big traffic accident on a crowded freeway on his Twitter, almost immediately. Articles are linked to far and wide, spread about the net with all the speed and ferocity of a wildfire. A politician could fart on stage, and within ten minutes, folks in Beijing will be reading about it. We can’t control information–not like we could. Sure, the Wall Street Journal has the inside scoop on economics, and a number of local papers are the only ones in the know for local issues, but that will all change, and soon. A generation, maybe two, tops, and everyone will be able to fulfill the basic roles that journalists used to provide–all for free. Concerned citizens, perhaps, or maybe just fame-hungry entrepeneurs, delighted by their high hit counters, eager to bring more faces to their blogs. Where once there was a weatherman, now there are dozens, voices detailing the climate in every corner of the country, on every landmass on the globe.
People need to realize that they are the ones who are holding the smoking gun. Journalism can throw a lot of blame inward–its hubris, its high expense, its unwillingness to change, to adapt–but the blame lies squarely on you, the average person. And good for you! Take charge of your information. For once, in all the history of the world, an individual holds the power to break the news, to shape how people understand their world. A few keystrokes, a wifi connection, and a single tweet can inform the world.
It’s up to you. Do you want that responsibility? Do you want to be the ones who have to tell everyone what’s happening? What’s going to happen? What has happened, and if it will happen again? If so, rush to your computers, hop onto your internet, make a blog, a twitter, a Facebook, go now! Do it! And with your power, your insurmountable power, you become a gear in the grinding machine that will crush the reporting industry beneath its mighty tread. I welcome it, invite you to do so, because it is your RIGHT. Your hard-won right and privelage to access this power, this digital godhood, and excersize it as you will. You may not make any money, but you weren’t being paid to tweet before. Keyword searches are growing more and more advanced. The sophistication of the average internet user is slowly but steadily growing, and people will find you if they need to.
Or don’t. Relinguish your responsibility, and fork over some cash. We’ll do it for you. We’ll tell you what’s going on, what the weather is, where the traffic accidents are. We’ll make you laugh, we’ll make you cry, we’ll broadcast daily life with the same finesse and familiar formulaic flavor we’ve done so for generations and generations.
But you gotta pay for it. Simple trade, right? We take away that responsibility, and you pay us for it. We do you a service, and you pay us for it. It’s one way or the other. You can’t continue to expect us to work for free. Eventually, there won’t be any point. Those with the spark will continue to report, to investigate, to dig into the dirt, but they won’t have the resources or the time they once had. Reporting will suffer, at least at first, until more and more people grow increasingly skeptical of what they see and hear. Not everyone KNOWS how the news is made. I’ll tell you, I think, later, when the coffin is almost nailed, and the grave is almost dug.
Before we go, we’ll tell you our secrets. Or at least I will. I’ll try. It’s the least we can do. Our industry may crumble, and burn to ashes, but our secrets, our techniques, our beliefs–they cannot die. They won’t. Someone will continue our work, someone will take up the mantle. They may rename it, regift it, repackage it, but it’ll be the same, fundamentally. Somebody has to. The world offers so little answers, and we have so many questions. Somebody has to seek out the truth, and report it.
Remember us when we’re gone. We weren’t great. We made a lot of mistakes. But we had some good times too, yeah? We helped you out when you needed it. We taught you something new that day, made you care, for a little while, about that girl who got kidnapped or that dog who got lost. We made you hate, for a little while, that crook who got busted or that senator who stole money. We did some good, if only a little bit. Remember Watergate. Remember Vietnam. Remember Murrow and McCarthy. Remember Walter Cronkite, the old, comforting voice of today, the wistful wizard who stared into space with a child’s eyes and invited us to partake in its wonder. Remember Peter Jennings–please, please remember Peter Jennings, who simply did his best. Remember me, the lost little voice of journalism’s present, the one who finally, finally sees the writing on the wall, and sadly, reluctantly accepts it.
We did our best. We had a good run. Now it’s your turn. It won’t be easy. Take it from me–it’ll be hard as hell. But with a little help from your friends, a little support from your family, and a little determination and persistence, you’ll be alright. You’ll make do.
Goodbye, media consumers. Remember: the future is up to you. Shape it as you see fit.
Do as thou wilt.
And do no harm.
